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FMK #3: I heard there was some real kinky stuff in these, y'all*
Okay! Now that I have gone through all the paperbacks and have a better idea of what I actually have, this should be a fun one. :D
Results from last week's FMK.
How FMK works: I am trying to clear out my unread books piles. So there is a poll, in which you get to pick F, M, or K. F means I should spend a night of wild passion with the book ASAP, and then decide. M means I should continue to commit to a long-term relationship of sharing my bedroom with it. K means it should go away, immediately and with prejudice. Anyone can vote, you don't have to actually know anything about the books.
I am going to start officially closing the poll and picking winners on Friday nights because I don't always have time on Sunday to read a whole novel. (although not actually closing it probably, people can still vote.)
Link to long version of explanation (on previous poll)
*I may have heard wrong
Results from last week's FMK.
How FMK works: I am trying to clear out my unread books piles. So there is a poll, in which you get to pick F, M, or K. F means I should spend a night of wild passion with the book ASAP, and then decide. M means I should continue to commit to a long-term relationship of sharing my bedroom with it. K means it should go away, immediately and with prejudice. Anyone can vote, you don't have to actually know anything about the books.
I am going to start officially closing the poll and picking winners on Friday nights because I don't always have time on Sunday to read a whole novel. (although not actually closing it probably, people can still vote.)
Link to long version of explanation (on previous poll)
Poll #18074 FMK #3: I heard there was some real kinky stuff in these, y'all*
Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 49
Clan of the Cave Bear by Jean Auel (1980)
Kushiel's Dart by Jacqcueline Carey (2001)
The Wraiths of Will and Pleasure by Storm Constantine (2003)
Touched by Venom by Janine Cross (2005)
Outlander by Diana Gabaldon (1991)
Guilty Pleasures by Laurel K. Hamilton (1993)
House of Zeor by Jacqueline Lichtenberg (1974)
High Couch of Silistra by Janet Morris (1977)
Tarnsman of Gor by John Norman (1966)
The Healing of Crossroads by Nick O'Donohoe (1990)
Kildar by John Ringo (2006)
*I may have heard wrong
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>>the author really loves how the MC's Scottish clansman husband has to constantly ~teach her a lesson
augh.
But I can be into vampire idfic sometimes!
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COTCB is very based in the Latest Paeloanthropological Research of the 1970s. So there are some cool bits where she invents actual people to go with excavated Neanderthal burials, and I think even the part at the very beginning where Ayla is orphaned was based on a find, and other stuff like that. But also paleoanthopology, including popular paleoannth, still hadn't really got started on all the self-reflection it needed(needs) to do about race. I also think the main reason it has sequels is that it got really popular - so the later books have kind of a different tone and are slightly less must-cram-all-known-cro-magnon-facts-into-book (though there's still a lot of that). The later books are why the series has a rep for lots of sex, but IIRC it's not particularly kinky sex, just relatively often and graphically described.
IDK I would say read the first one for its place in the history of popularized paleoanthropology, and then decide if you need to keep it and/or read the others. Starting with Mammoth Hunters is fine if you want story and sex (though actually I can't remember if she meets the dude in that book, they might not meet till the beginning of 3? IDK. He's in book 2 but he has a separate storyline), you won't be lost or anything if you skip the first one, but COTCB has a unique place in literary history.
Or you could just read that fanfic where Mulder and Scully get transported back to caveman times, I wonder if I still have a link?
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hey while you are here I have a Norse Archaeology question! Do you know if anybody has done any work on species diffusion vis a vis the Vinland voyages? Like, looking for evidence that Canadian species became established in the Norse sphere or vice versa at around that time or if all the Greenland plagues in the sagas are maybe related to New World stuff or anything like that? And if not, why not? Have been reading about the precolumbian chicken controversy and am curious.
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And yes, the first book is quite different from the rest -- it's all about Ayla growing up with her adoptive Neanderthal family, and the male lead doesn't even show up until book 2, nor does any romantic plotline or consensual sex for Ayla. It's interesting, as
The "ugly" bit in gehayi's quotes up there is one of the more hamhanded bits of the occasionally genuinely interesting way Ayla's basic assumptions about the world (including, but very much not limited to, what people do and should look like) were shaped by growing up among Neanderthals Of The Latest Paleoanthropological Research of the 1970s. There are both physical and cognitive things that everyone around her is good at that she struggles to barely manage, and things she's good at that seem miraculous, and so forth. Some of it, IIRC, is genuinely neat! (IIRC because I haven't read any of these books in about twenty years, and I was a teenager and a lot more oblivious to subtext at the time.) But some of that comes out too in book 2, when we have the male lead's POV on her as well as her own on him, though no longer any Neanderthals onscreen IIRC. But also, yeah, there's unexamined stuff including some awkward race stuff, not helped by the fact that later on we see dark-skinned Cro-Magnons but in book one we've only got Ayla The Tall And Blonde And Blue-Eyed. The fact that I remember it twenty years later means there's probably more racial awkwardness I've forgotten, too.
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And I agree on the rest of your analysis!